TimesWatch

In the final minutes before Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, MSNBC journalists did what you would expect from the liberal network: They mocked Sarah Palin. Killing time before Tim Kaine and Mike Pence took the stage, ex-Palin aides Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace regaled their left-wing hosts with behind the scenes stories from the 2008 debate prep. Wallace recounted, “She in rehearsal kept saying, ‘Senator O Biden.’ So she kept botching the name. And she was so nervous.”

Post-Brexit, the liberal media lashed out with myriad hysterical predictions of economic meltdown and threw around bitter accusations of xenophobia, with the New York Times leading the charge. Well, those dire predictions of crisis have not exactly panned out, but the Times is back trying to pump some life into the libel, by labeling any violent crime against any immigrant in England as Brexit-related. In Friday’s New York Times, Dan Bilefsky wrote: “Fatal Beating of Polish Man Fuels Debate Over Xenophobia in Britain.” The text box read: “Fears that the ‘Brexit’ vote has unleashed a wave of violence.” More like fear among sore losers in the press, who still can't grasp how they could have lost an election where everyone they knew voted the morally correct way.

What do you do if you are a liberal governor trying to present the public image of a concerned environmentalist and then get caught red handed using state employees to find oil on your personal property? Why you have Adam Nagourney of the New York Times perform spin control to paint a picture of yourself as a rugged outdoorsy type surviving as a nature boy on that very same land you wanted to exploit for an accursed fossil fuel. First we find Jerry Brown with his hand caught in the petroleum cookie jar as reported by Breitbart on November 5 followed by the nature boy spin control just now provided by the New York Times.

The New York Times is displaying an astounding lack of curiosity about a significant charge of racism relayed by its own editorial page editor. Brent Staples was quoting a Missourian article by University of Missouri journalism professor Cynthia Frisby when something she wrote just leaped off the page. It was a charge of racist slurs being hurled at her by fellow School of Journalism faculty members. So what is the response from the Times? Nothing. Even though it would be easy to investigate, they have not checked into her charges. Here is the shocking claim by Professor Frisby as relayed by the incredibly incurious Staples:

On the July 13 edition of The Kelly File, Fox personalities Megyn Kelly and Howard Kurtz hit The New York Times for leaving Ted Cruz’s new book, A Time For Truth, off their best seller list because of the paper’s suspicions about bulk purchases.

As multiple scandals engulfed the presidency, "Watching Washington This Week," a nytimes.com video featuring New York Times congressional reporters Jeremy Peters and Ashley Parker having a pseudo-informal chat outside the White House, managed to place President Obama as the victim of a cold Republican Congress.

Tuesday's front-page New York Times story by Michael Shear and Jonathan Weisman, "Obama Dismisses Benghazi Furor But Assails I.R.S," again emphasized partisan back-and-forth at the expense of journalistic digging into the actual facts of the IRS and Benghazi controversies swirling around the Obama White House.

Weisman's byline is an assurance that the story to follow will be light on details and heavy breathing on Republican partisanship. Tuesday's entry fit the bill, especially the lead sentence, in which Weisman prioritized the partisan angle of "Republican adversaries" over the substantive angle of "new questions about the administration’s conduct."

In his Sunday New York Times column, former White House reporter Frank Bruni took a whack at "America the Clueless" and Republicans in particular, but made a couple of pretty clueless errors of his own (Eighteen percent of AP survey respondents said Obama was Jewish)?

The New York Times did some damage control for the Obama administration in its lead editorial Tuesday, defending in part, the IRS's politically motivated audits against fledgling Tea Party nonprofits during the last campaign cycle. The paper ridiculously portrayed the White House as just as outraged as conservatives in a headline: "White House Under Fire: It Condemns I.R.S. Audits of Political Groups."

And the paper's own public editor lambasted the paper's soft-soap coverage of the scandal: "Many on the right – as noted last week in my blog posts about Benghazi – do not think they can get a fair shake from The Times. This coverage won’t do anything to dispel that belief."

New York Times's environmental reporter Justin Gillis earned an unusual two-column lead story part in Saturday's paper, part of his long-running scarefest series, "Temperatures Rising." The latest entry: "Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears." (Though that scary headline turns out to be upon further review a bit premature.) Gillis committed his usual smear of warming skeptics: "Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington...."

Scandalous news that the Internal Revenue Service intimidated nonprofit opponents of the Obama administration made page 11 of Saturday's New York Times.

The IRS apology to Tea Party and other conservative organizations for politically motivated targeting of their nonprofit status was dealt with in mild fashion by reporter Jonathan Weisman, though not on the front page. "I.R.S. Apologizes to Tea Party Groups Over Audits of Applications for Tax Exemption." The same audits that were applauded last year by the Times' s editorial page. And a Monday front-page follow-up was topped with what even liberal journalists found a bizarre headline: "IRS Focus on Conservatives Gives GOP an Issue to Seize On." That's the story?

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